December 9, 2008

"It's my own fault, I know. I'm picky. Casual sex doesn't do it for me. (I've always thought I had to be in love in order to make love.) I regard men with ambivalence, with alternate longing and fear. I've grown accustomed to being alone."

Once you've passed a certain age -- older than it used to be, but still not old enough -- it doesn't matter how much you love yourself and rejoice in being a whole, warm, wonderful woman. You can't help but see that as a person, you're terrific, but as a girlfriend-unit with optional wife-upgrade port, you're unmarketable. The thing to do is to stop reading men-vs.-women lifestyle journalism, take charge of singleness (like one Miss Florence King) and stop expecting that life owes you a reward for being a pretty, pretty princess inside.

It says she's marketing a book about how to enjoy living alone, but I'm getting depressed just thinking about it.

I hear there is a young man in Zhuhai in the Guangdong province of China who might serve her ably.

As I myself approach the trousers-rolled do-I-dare-eat-a-peach stage of life I too ponder the questions about sex and companionship and opportunities lost. But then I think To hell with that, what I really need is a good Cuban.

I mean, sex is great and all, but a woman is just a woman, while a good cigar is a smoke.

You can't help but see that as a person, you're terrific, but as a girlfriend-unit with optional wife-upgrade port, you're unmarketable.

My mother outlived my father, lived alone miserably for several years, then met a man and remarried at a sprightly 66 years of age. The gentleman was older and a widower. Man I tell you they are one happy couple! Celibacy isn't for everybody.

Man I tell you they are one happy couple! Celibacy isn't for everybody.

I think some people really are just happier being married. In fact, I remember reading somewhere a long time ago that a study showed the happier widows and widowers rated their marriages, the more likely they were to remarry.

I must say I too would find it difficult to meet many people besides young Mormon men, local politicians, and girl scouts if I never left my house.

The question of who you would meet if you never left your house is interesting. I would only meet Jehovah's Witnesses, people selling magazines, and yard service operators, most of whom do not speak English.

Sex is more or less important depending on the person. Marriage, it seems to me, is less about sex and more about cooperation and companionship. It's a lot easier to make it in the world when you have help.

Some people don't want to get married, and that's their choice. Other people make choices that guarantee they won't get married. If you let yourself get to be 300 pounds, your chances are slim. Leaving aside fairness, that's just how it works. If you're not that attractive but insist on high standards, then being single is a choice.

There's plenty of less attractive people (I'm one of them) that can still be good spouses. It's just a matter of priorities. Is it important to marry someone beautiful or reliable? The older you get the fewer options you have.

I'm very happy I met my wife. It's worked out great, mainly because I broke out of my old behavior pattern of being attracted to women I couldn't get along with. The getting along part is the important one.

This lady needs a good counselor. She will only change when she hurts enough to seek help. Meanwhile she is trying to enjoy her prision inside of walls she erected around herself. Thank God there is a hope and a Savior. He was born 2008 years or so ago, but has spent 1970 of those years interceeding in Heaven for the prisoner and the broken hearted. Merry Christmas to all.

It's always fascinating to read a memoir told by a narrator who has an illusory perspective on her life. Just like I love novels with "unreliable narrators," where you have to find the real story hiding behind the narrative.

She thinks her age and her desire for sex with love is a final judgment announcing the end of her sex life, and speaks as if that is an accurate general statement about single women in her age bracket.

Lots of women 55 and over find new sexual love, and not all of them are gorgeous. My grandmother was widowed in her early 50s and continued to have affairs into her late 70s.

This woman isn't finding love now for the exact same reasons she "missed the first batch" in her 20s. She didn't want it enough to make the adjustments needed to make a long-term relationship work. Also, the few stories she tells about her love life show someone who just doesn't pick up signals from other people, doesn't accept the men in her life for what they are because she doesn't accept herself for who she is. I'm sure her other relationships were variations on this theme.

She could get what she says she wants if she really wanted it. But she doesn't really want it. Not enough to change her ways.

My mom married the love of her life (older than she was by 13 years) at 60 after a bad marriage. Unfortunately, he died five years later. She hooked up with the runner up (one year younger usually dated younger women) almost immediately. He died a year later. Freak illness. She swore off men after that. Put an ad in the paper to sell some of the her second husband's stuff. The guy who came to look at it asked her out. She is embarrassed that he is 13 years younger. They're still together, but she has sworn she will never marry again.

But, yeah, even the Love of Life one was a huge "settling" adjustment in some ways. She looks very good for age. Her favorite movies are "A Walk In the Clouds" with Keanu Reeves "Bridges of Madison County" and "Moonstruck." It's a definite male/female perspective.

"These men. They want some pussy, but they're not willing to give me anything but appreciation. It's a valuable thing! You don't just give it away for nothing! I’ve got this thing and it’s fucking golden, and, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for fuckin’ nothing. I’m not gonna do it. And, and I can always use it.

She's a dog, and I'm a fat, ugly little man. All I know is I hadda good time last night. I'm gonna have a good time tonight. If we have enough good times together, I'm gonna go down on my knees and beg that girl to marry me. If we make a party again this New Year's, I gotta date for the party. You don't like her, that's too bad."

A few years ago a family friend fianlly got remarried after 40+ years of being single. He said it wasn't that he didn't want to get married again, just couldn't find the right woman. He said when he finally gave up looking, she found him.

"Life presents us with many different ways to love. Who's to say the sexual kind trumps everything else?"

Given the evidence of a two-page article you felt it necessary to write about it for Salon.com, I'll go out on a limb and suggest that you think so, Kit. The decision to write and publish the essay has significance for how we interpret the essay - compare the recent NYT article by the woman whose name escapes me momentarily about how awfully she treats her husband.

The story was a little uncomfortable to read, but I give her a lot of credit. She's had some heart-breaking relationships and seems to be trying to make the best of it. She's a little guarded and is playing it safe, though not a recluse. It's a natural enough reaction and I can definitely relate.

She's been in therapy for 15 years? Man, did they see her coming or what?

She needs to fire her therapist and find someone who can help her with her prickliness problem. She might call her financial planner friend and apologize for hanging up on him, give him a chance to apologize for his humorous but ham-fisted remark. Then she could probably stand to make the effort to forgive her father for disappointing her.

Also, if she really loves dogs like she says she does, she should look into adopting one. Otherwise, admit it to herself - she's a cat lady.

Example (emphasis mine):"But I had a real epiphany one morning, standing at the kitchen sink. I realized I was annoyed that I hadn’t got around to having the dripping faucet fixed, and calculated that I feel irritated once or twice a month about being alone. Then I had to laugh, because each of the men I nearly married used to piss me off several times a day.

"You were such a pretty girl," well-meaning friends have said over the years, as if that had anything to do with my forlorn attempts at love, "Why didn't you find a nice husband?" I used to cringe at these questions, flailing away in vain to come up with some reasonable, non-pathetic explanation about how the ones I could catch I didn’t want and the ones I wanted I couldn’t catch, or I’d shrug and say, "I’m still looking, sugar; you available?" Or, as Gloria Steinem observed once, “I don’t mate well in captivity.” "

Rhhardin advice to never date models or actors is well taken. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I have dated Victoria Secret models....Samuel Johnson said that being married or being single can both be bad but both cannot be worse.

Women like this piss me the fuck off because they wallow in their own made up notions of themselves and their inflated sense of femininity. As if she, being a woman basically viewed men as lower life forms unworthy of having them touch her and in the process willfully rejects them wholesale. Until sometimes when her base desires creep to the top and she besmirches her unsullied sense of self long enough to wallow with a man. Only to finally come to her overly inflated senses and realizes what she has done and then dons and resumes her prissy charade of being the childless, lovelorn, unmarried, celibate spinster, hear me mewl.

Lady, a bit of advice, get fucked every so often, appreciate a man and his finer qualities, ditch the pretenses and adopt a kid from Sally Struthers to ausage any guilt from being barren. Then start feeling good about yourself and save us the pain of reading your pity party.

"She could get what she says she wants if she really wanted it. But she doesn't really want it. Not enough to change her ways."

This question of what a person really wants is very deep and perplexing. You can say whatever a person has is the best evidence of what they want, but that makes it very easy. It's also very easy to assume what is really wanted -- as, here, a conventional marriage. It seems many of you are assuming both things: that she wants what she in fact has and that she wants a conventional marriage. These are very convenient assumptions. They are also contradictory.

It's been my quizzical observation that, while the allure of the hot young babe is written in indelible DNA, the only people who ever stop seeing a woman of any age as a woman -- and the only women who stop seeing themselves that way -- are middle-class, white Americans.

Since I'm a middle-class, white American, I'm vulnerable to that. A decade into caregiving, hell, I haven't had sex (in Bill Clinton's sense) for about that long and regularly contemplate with bemusement the possibility that I may in fact never have it again.

But I see around me evidence (like chickenlittle's and John Stodder's stories) that that's a crock. Unless you're dead set on believing in it. Then it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

At the end of that essay, if you scroll down to related stories, there is an article titled "The joy of no sex." It's written by a father of three who is a husband in a long-term conventional marriage. Only, it turns out, the marriage has an unconventional twist to it: involuntarily, changes in his wife's physiology have led the couple to go without sex for the last ten years. Nor do they sleep together in the same bed. His story, I think, would make useful reading to any two people of any age contemplating a serious love relationship.

What the writer discovers is the dignity and pleasure a grown man can experience when coital sex is set aside in the pursuit of more active parenting and a more empathetic, playful, intimate friendship with the person he is committed to. I suspect it's not the conventionality of their marriage that allows for that experience so much as two adults placing above everything else their mutual affection and joy in being in each other's company.

Paradoxically, at the end of his story, the writer anticipates his decade of chastity - and the personal growth effected by it - leading to the beginning of a new, perhaps unconventional erotic relationship with his wife. It would seem that faithfulness and perseverance in remaining true to one's core principles may have even more than just their own rewards.

That's unusual, Meade. I wonder what the guys who kick my butt whenever I come around here saying some men aren't fully human would have to say about that guy. I bet they'd sneer at him.

That said, I suspect most of the people who don't miss sex are postmenopausal women, to whom nature has done the kindness of making it optional.

Then again, we've been so propagandized about the all-importance of sex, and not even so much as a pleasure, but as a means of self-validation . . . that we, collectively, hardly know how to take it OR leave it anymore.

So true about the propagandizing of sex, amba. And isn't it ironic, for those of us who lived through and indulged in the so-called "free love" 60's and 70's, that we are now so perplexed by sex? As you say, we don't quite know how to take or leave it?

I am 55. I have been married 3 times with no rest in between for myself. I have 3 beloved children (all boys) none of whom are at peace or successful.I would give anything to have back some respite time.I have always been giving to others (which is good) but I am always resenting the fact that I never had alone time. (my own doing)I have been married to a man who has been verbally abusive for 22 yrs. Most of my family won't speak to me because of this and sometimes I feel as though I am in an abyss.Behold....the blessing you have.Namaste,Goldie